Form and Function are Closely connected in books. The physical appearance of books indicates purpose and intended readership. A combination of size, type, and page layout offers visible signals informing the reader of the content before he begins to read a book. Books that look different are different. They have different subject matters, purposes, and readerships.

Anyone browsing in a bookstore in the late twentieth century knows this. Today an illustration on the cover provides the most obvious clue concerning the subject matter and purpose of a book. When the cover shows a handsome man with a scowl on his face and a gun in his hand along with a beautiful young woman in distress—and possibly some degree of undress—we know that the book is a “thriller.” When the cover shows a spaceship, we know that the book is science fiction.

Reformers and Reform Movements can be hard on their adherents. For a variety of reasons—dissent over doctrine, differences over organization, tactics and objectives, even incompatibility between personalities — disagreements arise and with disagreement recrimination, bitterness, and fragmentation. All these elements were present in the quarrel that erupted in 1506 among followers of Savonarola and tore apart the movement of reform he had initiated. On this occasion, however, the additional disruptive and embittering component of gender played a prominent part in the quarrel. There are no villains in the story, only victims, both active and passive, of a traditional system of religious values. Any attempt to alter this system was construed as harmful to the cause by the male leaders of the Savonarolan movement and resisted accordingly.

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.

In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.